How the UNC System Shaped a Controversial Plan to Revamp College Accreditation

“Woke.” “Ideological fads.” “Cartels.”

That’s how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described university accreditors in late June. Accreditors evaluate academic quality, and schools can’t receive federal financial aid without their signoff. But DeSantis said the review bodies’ standards reinforce progressive ideology on campus, and he announced that Florida and several other state university systems were going to ditch their old accreditor and form a new one focused on public universities.

“They exert all this power over our educational institutions,” DeSantis said. “That stops today. Florida and our neighboring states—our sister states who are joining us in this effort—we’re going to have the last say on that.”

DeSantis’ critiques echoed widespread complaints among conservatives, including President Donald Trump, about college accreditation. But while Florida broke the news about the six-state accreditor now known as the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), more than 800 pages of public records and other documents obtained by The Assembly show the University of North Carolina System was at the center of the project for more than a year.

In July 2024, the UNC System and the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, convened representatives from Florida, Georgia, Iowa, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia to talk about alternatives to the current model for accreditation, documents show. The UNC System then recommended in a September 2024 report that North Carolina “establish an accreditation agency formed by state university systems.” The report laid out steps that are now the game plan for the new multi-state accreditor. 

This spring, Dan Harrison, the UNC System’s vice president for academic affairs, sent a document to system President Peter Hans describing himself and another UNC official, Andrew Kelly, as crucial to shaping how the accreditor would operate. “Currently, we enjoy some free ridership in that Florida is funding the effort, but the group relies on Kelly and Harrison for subject matter expertise,” the document stated. “There have not been major decision points where North Carolina’s preference has not been followed.”

The tension between DeSantis’ public posturing and North Carolina officials’ influential roles behind the scenes underscores a crucial question for many faculty and other skeptics: whether the new organization will be a non-ideological auditor focused on public schools’ particular needs, as UNC System leaders have pledged, or become a tool for conservatives to remake higher education.

“We aren’t interested in being an accreditor for any particular ideology,” Harrison, who is now North Carolina’s top official on the CPHE project, told The Assembly. “We want ideology to not be a part of accreditation.”

While it could take years before CHPE can be approved by the U.S. Department of Education, records obtained by The Assembly show at least three North Carolina schools have taken steps to switch accreditors, which they must do every 10 years under state law. But officials from all three—UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central University, and Winston-Salem State University—said the process is on hold while they wait for guidance from the system on the new accreditor.

Harrison said the group expects schools will be able to start applying to join this fall. He emphasized that joining the accreditor will be voluntary, and no state intends for its universities to move all at once. 

“What President Hans has charged us to do is to build something that’s good enough that people flock to us,” Harrison said. “Based on the initial reception within the UNC System and across the six [founding states] and beyond the six, we’re well on our way to do that.”

‘State-Driven Alternatives’

In general, there’s a lot of appetite within higher education for reforming accreditation. University leaders have long complained about accreditors, which they see as bureaucratic and inflexible. But the political tinge of the debate is more recent.

Under the 1965 Higher Education Act, accreditors must evaluate 10 broadly defined areas in assessing an institution’s quality, such as student achievement, curriculum, faculty, finances, and compliance with federal laws. In the U.S., most schools belong to independent accreditors that used to oversee particular regions. While it is technically a voluntary process, federal financial aid is so crucial to most schools that accreditation is, in practice, a requirement.

Over the years, however, conservatives have increasingly accused accreditors of stepping on institutions’ and states’ toes over governance issues. Conservatives also argue the bodies force colleges to adopt progressive ideologies. While some large accreditors have diversity, equity, and inclusion standards, the main accreditor of Southern schools, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, or SACSCOC, does not.

In North Carolina, tensions with SACSCOC came to a head in 2023. Belle Wheelan, SACSCOC’s president at the time, publicly questioned whether the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees violated its standards in launching the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which some on campus have criticized as a conservative center. Wheelan said the inquiry focused on whether the trustees had sought sufficient faculty input before starting a new academic program. A tenet of academia known as “shared governance” says professors should have some say in running universities.

A few months after the conflict with SACSCOC, North Carolina passed a law that requires public colleges to switch accreditors every 10 years. The law also directed the UNC System Board of Governors to establish a commission to study accreditation alternatives and “invite stakeholders, including stakeholders from other states, to participate.” 

By the end of 2023, the system charted its progress in an interim report to the legislature, which has not been reported, though it was a public document. The report said the UNC System had “engaged with research organizations interested in reforming the higher education accreditation process” and explored hosting officials from other states to discuss “state-driven alternatives to regional accreditation.”

The system reported that it had begun recruiting officials from Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and Texas for initial discussions. Florida had recently passed a similar law to North Carolina’s following its own high-profile clashes with SACSCOC, and its colleges had already begun switching away from SACSCOC.

Harrison declined to elaborate on the multi-state group’s meetings but said that the key takeaway from those early conversations was a shared desire for an accreditor of only public institutions. Though all of the participants were from Southern states, Harrison said they were invited based on UNC System officials’ personal networks, not location. 

“Geography-based accreditation in 2025 doesn’t really make sense,” he said. “Accreditation is about peer review. Publics are peers of one another in certain fundamental ways.”

Pros and Cons

By early March this year, emails obtained by The Assembly indicate that discussions about the new accreditor were in full force.

Jason Jewell, the chief academic officer for the State University System of Florida, requested a meeting in early March with senior administrators at the state university systems in North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia. (South Carolina would formally join the project later, system representatives told The Assembly. Louisiana’s governor signaled interest in July.)

A few days after the meeting, Harrison emailed a draft of a memorandum of understanding outlining the accreditation project to Kelly, a senior adviser to the UNC System and the CEO of Project Kitty Hawk, the system’s online education nonprofit.

Some emails suggest that the UNC System hadn’t committed to the multi-state coalition at that point. As first reported by Inside Higher Ed, Harrison sent an email to Hans and several other top system officials in late April about an expected executive order from Trump on accreditation and an update on the multi-state effort that was by then being called the “Florida project.”

The day that Trump signed the executive order, which made it easier for new accreditors to receive federal approval, Hans directed Harrison to convene a group of system officials and tell him the “pros and cons of joining [a] multi-state coalition vs forming a NC entity.” 

Harrison’s response, obtained by The Assembly, said that North Carolina would have more control if it opted to go it alone, but starting an accreditor as part of a bigger group might prevent trouble if a future president decided to reverse the executive order. 

“No administration is likely to attack the accreditor of choice for several major public state systems,” Harrison wrote. He said a single-state agency that accredited its own public institutions would be “fully uncharted” because other state-based groups, such as one in New York, only accredited private institutions.

Harrison said in the interview that he felt the multi-state accreditor was “definitely the right call” for the system. “The Venn diagram between it and the system office would just be a circle, right?” Harrison said of a single-state auditor. “That wouldn’t really make any sense.”

No Free Ride

Hans ultimately planted his stake in the ground in a vague but surprise announcement during a May 15 UNC System Board of Governors meeting.

“There are longstanding frustrations with the cumbersome and incredibly time-consuming burden the current system places on our campuses,” Hans told the board. “That concern has been compounded by too much accreditor focus on topics and concerns not closely tied to student outcomes or quality instruction, straying into matters well outside the realm of academic accountability.”

The announcement piqued the interest of some onlookers. Steve Taylor, a senior fellow at the right-leaning policy group Stand Together Trust, wrote in an email to Kelly that he and Laura Demarse, the vice president of the conservative-backed Charles Koch Foundation, had “been in regular contact with Peter to explore ways Stand Together and CKF can support some of the great things UNC wants to do and take advantage of the new policy landscape.”

“Absolutely—would love to brief you both,” Kelly responded, looping Harrison into the email thread and meeting.

A few days later, Kelly sent a text message to Nicholas Kent, the second-highest ranking official in Trump’s Department of Education. “Congratualtions [sic] on the accreditation EO [executive order] which is very good work,” Kelly wrote. “I wanted to get your take on if/when it would be appropriate or advisable for the principals (4-5 state university system heads) to brief Secretary [Linda] McMahon on the plan and progress to date.”

Despite the conservative interest, Harrison said CPHE is “fundamentally the same” as other accreditors in many ways. It has to enforce the same 10 accreditation principles as its future competitors, and the structure of the organization’s application, review, and enforcement mechanisms mirrors existing agencies.

Harrison said he, another UNC System employee, and a South Carolina staffer are the three full-time employees working for CPHE. He said that was to match the contribution from Florida, which will officially host the accreditation body and contribute $4 million in start-up funds. CPHE has become a “team effort” since it was incorporated in Florida, he said.

“The Andrew Kelly, Dan Harrison internal think tank is a lot less important than it had been at very early stages,” he said. Harrison added with a laugh: “I no longer feel like we’re a free-rider.”

Florida’s university system did not respond to requests for comment.

‘An Apolitical, Nerdy Accreditor’

Some of the accreditor’s early moves have rankled faculty. 

Two weeks ago, CPHE released draft standards that member universities would have to meet, according to a copy shared with The Assembly and first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At a high level, many of the 24 proposed standards largely seem comparable to other accreditors’ general guidelines, centering on issues such as compliance with federal laws, governance and leadership, and the quality of academic programs. 

But others are less clear, such as a standard about “viewpoint diversity,” which is a common term used by conservatives to advocate for more right-leaning faculty at universities.

Kevin Kinser, an education policy professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies accreditation, said the draft leaves many questions about how the standards will be evaluated. For example, if “viewpoint diversity” is a standard, he questioned how institutions would prove that they have faculty across the ideological spectrum.

“Diversity of viewpoints is fine, but without the detail associated with it, that could be framed in ways that would be more difficult to accept from an academic freedom perspective,” he said. “The context of it is important.”

Belle Boggs, the president of North Carolina’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said faculty who have reviewed the standards so far are concerned about the framing of viewpoint diversity. “I will believe that this document, that this accrediting body, is non-ideological when robust protections for academic freedom are within the accrediting body’s draft language,” she said. “Right now, it is not.”

Boggs remains skeptical of the whole accreditation project. “For this group of ideologues to claim that they’re going to create an independent, non-ideological accreditation body—announced by Ron DeSantis—it’s immediately clear that this is politicizing our universities and will interfere with our ability to do our jobs, to recruit the best faculty, to recruit the best students,” she said.

Harrison declined to comment on the concerns surrounding the proposed viewpoint diversity standard. But he said the draft standards have been shared with faculty bodies at institutions across the involved state systems, as well as dozens of external higher education associations, to seek “comment from across the political spectrum.”

“We are interested in receiving broad-based feedback and, wherever possible, coming to reasonable consensus,” he said.

For those who have questions or doubts about the new accreditor’s conservative influences, Harrison’s message was simple.

“Judge us by what we do. Judge us by the standards when they’re adopted, by the procedures when they’re adopted, by the membership of our board,” he said. “I think that people who want to see an apolitical, nerdy accreditor are largely going to be pleased.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated which official sent a text message to Nicholas Kent. It was Andrew Kelly.